Saturday, January 10, 2009

COLUMBIA â" Gov. Mark Sanford released a 300-page prescription Friday for spending $5.8 billion on government in the next fiscal year, a plan he said would put South Carolina back on track after months of dramatically falling tax collections have shrunken South Carolina's state budget to $6.1 billion from more than $7 billion approved last year.

Another young man is shot to death, but his family is hoping some good might come of the slaying. Parris M. Green, 17, was killed Thursday evening while walking near his house in North Charleston. A witness said a man shot Green to death about 6:30 p.m. near Mary Ford Elementary School, after chasing him down Accabee Road.

In a bid to shore up its finances, the American College of the Building Arts has sold McLeod Plantation back to the Historic Charleston Foundation and scrapped controversial plans to use the property for a college campus. "The college has nothing more to do with McLeod Plantation," said college President Colby M. Broadwater.

North Charleston charity founder Albert Salmon Jr. was convicted of four state tax evasion charges Friday after a prosecutor described him as a slum lord who hid his fraud behind an adopted title of reverend. If he didn't call himself a man of the cloth, the case might be an open and shut prosecution of a businessman hiding assets, Assistant Attorney General Tom McDermott said.

GOOSE CREEK â" A Rutt Lane resident didn't have to look far for a man suspected of firing a gun across from Goose Creek High School on Thursday afternoon. He found him in his bed. After shots were fired about 2 p.m. at Prestige Car Wash on Red Bank Road, Berkeley County deputies spotted a suspect vehicle, a white Ford F-150 pickup truck, unoccupied near the Rutt Lane resident's home.